The End of Overwork

For decades, the tech world glorified the hustle. Pulling all-nighters. Living on Red Bull and stack traces. Bragging about 80-hour weeks like it was a badge of honor. And yeah, I’ve been there. Many of us have.

But here’s the thing: the word workaholic isn’t exactly aspirational. It literally borrows its shape from alcoholic. That alone should be a hint.

We’re entering a new era, thanks to GenAI—not of working more, but working better and smarter.

And that means rethinking everything we were taught about productivity.

This blog post is a follow-up to the one I wrote recently about Pomodoro timers and using bursts of focus to manage your time. But today, I want to zoom out a bit and talk about the quality of your work—and how working less can actually get you more.

The Zone Is Where It’s At

Let’s start with a simple truth: if you’re not in the zone, you’re probably wasting time.

The real magic happens when you’re deep in focus. You know the feeling—your brain locks in, time melts, and suddenly you’re knocking out code or writing or design like you’re possessed by some productive spirit.

But here’s the catch: it takes effort to get there. You don’t stumble into flow while half-scrolling Slack and toggling between ten tabs.

So the goal isn’t to work longer. The goal is to get into the zone faster and stay there long enough to ship something valuable.

Tactics That Actually Work

One of our engineers swears by switching tasks every 45 minutes. You might think 45 minutes is too short, but if you are in the zone for that much time you get much more done, like you worked for 2 hours.

If he’s deep in bug fixing and starts to feel foggy, he jumps over to reviewing code or sketching out UX flows. He says changing context helps “reboot his brain.”

And the funny part? He gets more done than when he used to grind through eight hours on one problem.

Another example: we’ve got a designer who builds lo-fi concepts in the morning with music on and sunlight streaming in—and then does all her feedback iterations in the afternoon in a dark room with rain sounds. She’s made her work environment modular to match her creative cycles.

That’s the level of intentionality we should all aim for.

Focus Is the Real Flex

It’s not about time—it’s about focus. And focus is fragile. So protect it.

Clean up your desktop. Mute notifications. Play some white noise or ambient playlists. Work from a different spot if it helps. Your tools are personal—find what gets you into the zone and use it with discipline.

Burnout isn’t a side effect of hard work—it’s a signal that the system you’re using is broken.

At Appmosis, we’re optimizing for quality. We’d rather have two hours of deep, meaningful work from you than ten hours of background task-switching and Slack skimming.

Let the others brag about 80-hour weeks. We’ll take 30 smart hours and a clean commit history.

Better inputs, better output. That’s the game now.